Steve Jobs -- Film Review

Steve Jobs

Directed by Danny Boyle

This is an excellent portrayal of an extremely paranoid personality and the destruction that such a person can cause.  It is so much better than the recent film Steve Jobs:  The Man in the Machine, which attempted to elevate Steve Jobs into a mythological figure of dazzling achievements, which I reviewed here.  This film accentuates his character, which was extremely unattractive and fraught with destructiveness toward those closest to him.  Paranoid people are very uncomfortable with intimacy, tenderness, affection, warmth, and goodwill.  They need antagonism, rivalry, and hostility, and thus every personal relationship becomes converted into one of predominant animosity despite the best efforts and the goodwill of those involved with such a person who try to show them genuine love and support.  The film captures this very well.  One of the most poignant moments of the film was when his young daughter spontaneously hugged him.  Jobs did not hug her back, and later refused to pay her college tuition.  Steve Jobs could not love and he could not give, but he could make concessions when pressured.  He understood power and coercion -- that's how computers operate -- and those were the terms under which you had to deal with him.  He terminated all of the philanthropic programs at Apple.  He alienated every person who tried to love him and engage him on a level of genuine friendship.  He simply did not believe in it.  It goes back to his upbringing, which the film did not explore in any great depth, but to its credit, brought up several times through the character of John Sculley, the CEO who eventually led the revolt which fired Steve Jobs from Apple.

Steve Jobs was given up for adoption by his birth parents, and his mother as the film reports "refused to love him" during the first year of his life.  This fateful misfortune shaped his destiny in his human relations.  Children who are not loved in their earliest encounter with life develop the impression that the world is a hostile place and that love is a dangerous illusion.  It becomes the foundation of their character and shapes every relationship they enter into.  Think of J. Edgar Hoover, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin,  Kim Jong Un, Mao Tse Dong, Anthony Comstock, James Jesus Angleton,  Leo Tolstoy, and many others whose personalities are organized around a core delusion of being beset by a world full of enemies, and in response they wreak enormous destruction on those around them and the world at large.  It begins at birth in these people and it is an formidable deficit to overcome. 

Jobs was a grandiose person who needed the spotlight, who needed acclaim, who needed subservience in his minions and needed the world to revolve around him.  Anything outside of his closed world was the enemy.   Jobs need for control was paramount, and it is perfectly understandable that he would gravitate to computers, which are the ultimate control machines.  He carried it to the extent that Apple products  became a closed proprietary system that were incompatible with anything else in the computer industry.  The machines could only be opened with specialty tools to prevent people from modifying them and adapting them to their own needs and desires.  This held Apple back and resulted in some spectacular commercial failures, and, incidentally, is the reason why I, to this day, have never bought an Apple product.  I knew instinctively, long ago, that Apple was a police state and I didn't want anything to do with it.  This film validates that perception, and reveals that  it was much worse and far more thoroughgoing than I ever imagined.  Jobs did not like to be dependent on anyone, emotionally or in any other way, -- very much in the paranoid style -- and this explains his repeated rebuffs of Steve Wozniak's efforts to get him to publicly acknowledge the achievements of the team that created the Apple II computer, which was the company's sole success in its early years. 

The film ends in 1998 with the launch of the iMac well before Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  There is a tentative reconciliation with his daughter, Lisa, implied.  Much has been undoubtedly left out and there is inevitably significant simplification.  However, I think this film captures much of the truth in Steve Jobs' character and his relations with those closest to him.  It is an effective counterweight to a lot of the idealizing and sanitizing and myth creation that tends to be promoted about Jobs in the mainstream media.  This film is a much more worthy presentation of Steve Jobs than anything else I have seen so far.